SuBLime Manga Republishing Yaoi Titles From Defunct Publishers

I haven’t seen any official notice of this, so maybe everyone already knows and I just missed a press release, but while browsing the list of SuBLime Manga yaoi books at their website, I started noticing some familiar titles. All had one thing in common: a description that said “This volume was produced as a direct-to-Kindle release from Japan. Please enjoy!”

I’m not sure what that means, or whether they’re available to non-Kindle readers, but all of these titles were previously released in print in English from now-defunct publishers. (They’re keeping the titles as previously translated, which made research easy.) The books include:

The books in this list don’t appear on the SuBLime release calendar, but it was exciting to me to see that one of the best yaoi titles is available again in the U.S.

Update: Brigid Alverson spoke to Leyla Aker, vice president of publishing for Viz Media, for more details (link no longer available). All of these titles were published by the same Japanese publisher, Libre, which is owned by the retailer Animate, who is a partner with Viz in the SuBLime label.

“These are not SuBLime books,” said Aker. “We are selling them through the SuBLime site, but they are not part of the SuBLime imprint, and when you open up the books themselves, there is an ad card in front that specifies this is a title that is released by Animate.”

Aker has a very modern attitude when it comes to digital releases. She says,

“The old lines between what constitutes an author, a publisher, and a distributor are all starting to get blurry because digital doesn’t follow the structures of print. It’s best to think of these titles as having a new distributor, not a new publisher. There was no extra creation that went into these; SuBLime did not go in and re-create translations or anything else. We were just taking files and repackaging them for purchase.”